1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to sliced food products which have corrugations on opposite surfaces and methods and apparatus of manufacturing such sliced products.
2. Description of the Background Art
Potato chips, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 2,769,715 and having a wavy or corrugated configuration, are commercially manufactured and sold. The corrugated potato product which has met with substantial commercial success has parallel corrugations on the opposite surfaces thereof which are "in-phase", i.e., the ridges on one side directly overlie valleys on the opposite side so that the thickness of the chip is substantially uniform throughout the entire chip. U.S. Pat. No. 2,769,715 also discloses a sliced corrugated potato product wherein the corrugation on opposite sides are "out-of-phase", i.e., the ridges on one side directly overlie the ridges on the other side, and a sliced corrugated potato product wherein the corrugations on one side are crisscrossed relative to the corrugations on the opposite side. Such out-of-phase and crisscrossed corrugated potato products have periodically varying thicknesses throughout which, when subjected to a cooking process, such as frying, cook at different rates producing unique texture and flavor different from the products of uniform thickness. The out-of-phase corrugated product has substantial weaknesses at the mating opposing valleys of the product which results in undue breaking and fragmentation of the product during manufacture, packaging and handling. The crisscross corrugated product has substantially greater strength; however, existing processes and apparatus for manufacturing such crisscross corrugated products have one or more deficiencies, such as requiring excessive maintenance, being substantially more costly, having higher scrap losses, and restricted to only a small range of potato size, when compared to non-corrugated and in-phase corrugated potato products. Thus, commercialization of the out-of-phase and crisscross corrugated potato product has been limited.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 447,643, filed Dec. 7, 1982, assigned to the assignee of this invention, discloses a food product with opposite parallel corrugations of different frequencies. The different frequencies of the corrugations provide the food product with varying thicknesses.
There thus remains a need in the art for an inexpensively produced corrugated food product with varying thicknesses which possesses unique flavor and texture characteristics after cooking.